Acupunture; I was very sceptical too at first Paul, but it really does work... no heyfever for me anymore.

Tina singing/guitar playing was like listening to 'Smelly Cat' by Phoebe in Friends, made me laugh! Maybe you guys could do something like crazy frog, ping a ding ding ding...barp!!! Crazy frog is very annoying and I'll probably not watch that episode of ping if you do it!!! ;o)

Paul: Microsoft Windows Unit President Steven Sinofsky and VP Julie Larson-Green made some comments during the demo (~3:45) at D9 to the effect that Windows 8 apps are built in HTML5 and Javascript. Tech sites have run with this, and the developer community is up in arms on the future of .NET, Silverlight, and VS.

Some time ago he was on a vacation in the Virgin Islands (Before he was a big shot businessman).

When they were heading home, their flight was cancelled. Instead of waiting around Richard rented a private plane. Then he wrote "Virgin Airlines" on a piece of paper and sold tickets to thetemp flight - making a good buck - and got home a lot faster.

Laura: I like the way your hair is coming along. I think you should make and keep it long - or at least 'longish'. (That's just my opinion.) Like Rapunzel, you never know when you may need it to escape from a tall building of some kind.

C'mon guys. Wouldn't it make sense to take a moment and read up on a topic before standing in front of cameras and talking about it? I would go so far as to say that you have a smidgeon of responsibility to your viewers to inform yourselves, particularly if your going to pass judgment on someone's research by calling it quackery.

To be clear, a QUACK is defined a person who dishonestly claims to have special knowledge and skill in some field, typically in medicine.

I'm assuming you just didn't do your homework, so I'll provide you with a bit of information here:

The system I built uses depth information from the Kinect to translate the therapist's movements into imagery which is projected onto the client during a healing session. Both the client and practitioner wear video goggles so that they may see themselves from an out-of-body camera perspective. When face-down, clients use the face-cradle display to see themselves. The idea is that a person’s perception of pain is tied to subjective visual feedback.

My suggestion is that you go to the website and take a moment to read some of the actual research: www.intelligenthealingspaces.com

I'm assuming you just didn't do your homework, so I'll provide you with a bit of information here:

The system I built uses depth information from the Kinect to translate the therapist's movements into imagery which is projected onto the client during a healing session. Both the client and practitioner wear video goggles so that they may see themselves from an out-of-body camera perspective. When face-down, clients use the face-cradle display to see themselves. The idea is that a person’s perception of pain is tied to subjective visual feedback.

My suggestion is that you go to the website and take a moment to read some of the actual research: www.intelligenthealingspaces.com

I think they were simply being funny (well, Paul tries to be you know how that is) and not passing judgement.

I had a look at that link you posted and in the 1st paragraph it says "While there is no clinical evidence yet of any benefits from this system ...". I'm not seeing the evidence this actually works?

If this does work for some people, then that is fantastic and should be used but it doesn't mean it'll work for everyone. We are all entitled to an opinion, it just needs some hard evidence before they can say the un-believers are wrong.

Thank you for taking time to read and respond. The article you quoted comes from a tech blog reporting on my work. The research I'm referring to can be found under the research menu. There you'll find several related research papers. This, for example, comes from the Oxford Journal of Rheumatology (Mar 29, 2011):

There is increasing evidence that drug-free illusion therapies can be beneficial for the amelioration of chronic pain, particularly so for conditions in which some of the pain is thought to have a cortical origin. For example, mirror therapy and size reduction illusions can reduce pain in complex regional pain syndrome type 1 (CRPS1) patients, the majority of whom have disturbed body representations with some reporting their hand as larger than in reality [ 1] and others describing parts of their hand as foreshortened [ 2]. If cortical misrepresentation of body parts contributes to pain, then manipulating the appearance of those body parts might be a useful tool in the reduction of pain. This letter describes an exploratory experiment using unique visuo-proprioceptive illusions that manipulated the perceived size of painful and non-painful parts of the hand in an attempt to modulate pain experienced in OA.

Some interesting reading. What I'm getting from this (and correct me if I'm wrong) is that the benefit is not from the light itself but our percention of what the light is doing (and of course what our brains tricks itself into doing in response). So in the case of Laura's lovely poochie, it really needs to be seeing what is going on to perhaps get any benefit out of it.

The visually induced out of body experience aspect is interesting but it still sounds like quackery even given your definition of the term. You're calling it "Intelligent Healing" without any evidence that real (not placebo) healing is going on. "Intelligent" in this context just seems like a marketing term intended to make people think it really heals. That sounds dishonest from the get-go so I'msorry if it biases my response.

I did click through the research links and I'm sorry if I missed it but I didn't see any research about the use of projected light. Is this new research that you are doing? It looks cool but the obvious concern is that it could be misused / misrepresented by real quacks peddling "energy field" healing. Look how many people are falling for the PowerBalance holographic bracelet scam. Heck, look how many people still think acupuncture works.

Please forgive me for being anything less than respectful. I appreciate the open discussion.

I call the project an Intelligent Healing Space because I am creating an environment that can perceive and respond to client/therapist presence and interaction. The project goes far beyond a Kinect hack. The Kinect is a depth sensor; I use that depth information to inform the behavior of the space. The video posted here is a test of the use of depth information to inform the behavior of a projected particle system. What you see is just the very beginning of what will become an increasingly intelligent environment designed to gather and respond to information for the purpose of augmenting, assisting, and participating in traditional healing modalities.

The international research on induced out-of-body experience and subjective visual feedback is all relatively new. Evidence suggests that distortion of subjective visual feedback can modulate pain and sensitivity. For example, if you are shown a realtime image of your own back, the blood flow and temp of the area you see will fluctuate relative to the size distortion of the image. If you couple these ideas with the research regarding the fluid boundaries of our proprioception (our awareness of ourself in space), then you begin to see the potential of inducing out-of-body experiences within intelligent environments equipped with augmented reality and interactive video projections.

The "energy field healing" to which you refer, as well as "intelligent healing" are bits and fragments of a much more comprehensive endeavor. What I found to be extremely interesting during these past 2 months of media coverage is the evolution of the media's perception of the project. One article leaves off a word, another article adds two words, and suddenly the titles I use to distinguish various aspects of the project are being sewn together and used to define the project itself. I'm doing my best to provide the public with as much information as I can, but it seems that all too often people base their opinion on what other people have written about what other people have written about what other people have written about the actual project. This is no excuse for my defensiveness in response to Ping's opinions. Clearly the project's website needs an overall if the spirit of my work is to be gleaned before exhausting one's span of attention.

Again, this is an ongoing project, one that I am currently working on in grad school at NYU's interactive tech program. No one really knows what the healing effects are because I am just now inventing the thing. In the meantime, I am grateful that there exists a growing body of related credible research to which I can refer people when they demand hard science. How it all comes together in practice, however, remains to be seen.

C'mon guys. Wouldn't it make sense to take a moment and read up on a topic before standing in front of cameras and talking about it? I would go so far as to say that you have a smidgeon of responsibility to your viewers to inform yourselves, particularly if your going to pass judgment on someone's research by calling it quackery.

To be clear, a QUACK is defined a person who dishonestly claims to have special knowledge and skill in some field, typically in medicine.

I'm assuming you just didn't do your homework, so I'll provide you with a bit of information here:

The system I built uses depth information from the Kinect to translate the therapist's movements into imagery which is projected onto the client during a healing session. Both the client and practitioner wear video goggles so that they may see themselves from an out-of-body camera perspective. When face-down, clients use the face-cradle display to see themselves. The idea is that a person’s perception of pain is tied to subjective visual feedback.

@cbae:To be fair to Jason, Paul does talk about hack/quack at 11:20ish, but I think it was just a joke. We all have open minds here (I'm sure).

You're right. After rewatching that segment, I now realize that there was indeed a mention of the word "quack", but I simply stated that I didn't recall the word being uttered. Maybe because it was the subtle way in which he said it. I don't think he was saying it any mean-spirited way though. Otherwise, I would have really would have remembered his saying the word "quack".

Doctor WhoPicture is of Tom Baker, who played the Doctor, from 1974 to 1980.

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